Collaborations

Let’s craft your story together. Through collaboration, insights, and strategic initiatives, we will discover the best path for your project.

Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here

Co-organized by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here is the first major retrospective of Lacy’s fifty-year career. Conceived as one exhibition at two venues, the SFMOMA presentation features approximately seventy solo and collaborative works from Lacy’s earliest feminist performances and photographs to her recent immersive video installations. The YBCA presentation departs from the traditional retrospective format and focuses instead on an experimental approach to authorship and participation by exhibiting two of Lacy’s groundbreaking works, The Oakland Projects (1991–2001) and La piel de la memoria / Skin of Memory (1999), as an entry point to examine today’s youth culture and media activism.

Curated by Rudolf Frieling, Dominic Willsdon and Lucía Sanromán

YBCA Exhibition Website

Exhibition Press:

ArtNews

The Economist

Art in America

Frieze

i-D

Hyperallergic

Youth Speaks partnered with Manifest Creative, a team of Bay Area filmmakers, photographers, and writers, to co-create a series of visual stories that take the viewer into the daily lives of four young poets. Whereas much of the media documenting youth spoken word focuses on polished stage performance, this multimedia installation gives a more nuanced and intimate look into the creative process. A poem does not begin or end on the stage. It writes itself in the messy, awkward, and joyous swirl of a young person’s lived experience. Through a blend of B-roll, studio, and performance footage, each video captures the raw and rich emotional universe from which the poem emerges. Embedded in a white board, this exhibition invites the viewer to engage, interact, and respond to Youth Speaks prompts inspired by the featured poets’ words. The stories presented here weave together narratives that are personal and political, that give voice to memory, and imagine an unwritten future. From the initial brainstorm to installing the show, every decision reflects a symbiotic peer-to-peer process wherein the poets and filmmakers negotiated the terms of representation. This is an attempt at contributing to a visual grammar that doesn’t merely include “diverse voices,” but is produced for and by them.

Collin Young, Director | Manifest Creative

Olivia Avilla, Co-Producer | Manifest Creative

Isa Nakazawa, Co-Producer | Youth Speaks

The California Spoken Word Project

The California Spoken Word Project is a 2-year statewide initiative in partnership with the California Endowment that is designed to build and train a statewide network of organizations and educators committed to facilitating spaces to develop the voice and power of young people through unique spoken word pedagogical practices.

The Project will strengthen the pedagogical practices of up to 10 individual partner programs/organizations across the state of California. In addition, by establishing a network that engages and supports these partners, each respective program/organization will receive increased visibility on a statewide level and will have opportunities to adapt and refine their individual program designs through the regular exchange of ideas and best practices.

In collaboration with Youth Speak, these videos are produced for The California Spoken Word Project and their individual partner programs/organizations.

Collin Young, Director | Manifest Creative

Olivia Avilla, Co-Producer | Manifest Creative

Isa Nakazawa, Co-Producer | Youth Speaks

Cassie Newman, Co-Producer | Youth Speaks

Jessa Brie Moreno Co-Producer | Studio Pathways